“Rousseau’s essay was so important because it put words to my relationship with nature,” says Nicolas Becker of Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Rousseau’s unfinished text from the 18th century
This article is taken from the Autumn/Winter 2023 issue of AnOther Magazine:
“I first encountered Reveries of the Solitary Walker at school. I was not very interested in prose, but I was really into philosophy and poetry. When I was a kid I spent a lot of time walking in nature, climbing rocks and swimming. As a foley artist I’m sometimes called a ‘walker’ too. Rousseau’s essay was so important because it put words to my relationship with nature – emotions I try to share through film, where the audience can fill the work with their own experiences and memories. I record all the sounds I use – they don’t come from a library, they are linked to a moment in my life – and I believe that if I feel an emotion when I hear them, the audience will feel the same thing. They will invoke their own memory and that will be integrated into the film experience too. The phenomenological experience is extremely important to me. I’m not an academic, I’m a practitioner. I learn from experience – through mimicking nature, through listening to the real world. When I work with film, most of the time the dialogue is done, the storytelling and structure are done, so I’m working with ideas and sensations. In film, producers often don’t care about the gesture, they want the result – that’s the total opposite of the art world, where the gesture is sometimes even more important than the result.”
Nicolas Becker worked as a foley artist as part of the 1990s French cinema scene before going on to become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after sound designers. His credits include La Haine, Gravity, Ex Machina and Arrival, and in 2021 he took home the Academy Award for Best Sound for his work on the sensorial masterpiece Sound of Metal. Becker’s expressive approach has won him fans across the artistic spectrum: when not working on films, his projects have included creating an immersive sound installation for the Louis Vuitton runway alongside the contemporary artist Philippe Parreno (with whom he’s also worked on an exhibition with the musician Arca) and collaborating with Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective. Becker is currently working with the experimental filmmaker Momoko Seto and Oscar-winning director Andrea Arnold on their next features and readying a project with the choreographer Wayne McGregor – he’s also gearing up to release a debut album of his own.
Hair: Kyoko Kishita. Make-up: Akari Sugino at St Vincent Management using SUQQU. Producer: Philippa Schoeman at Artistry
This story features in the Autumn/Winter 2023 issue of AnOther Magazine, which is on sale now. Order here.